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Deception and Estimating: How We Fool Ourselves Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception-overly optimistic about outcomes. In fact, we surely wouldn't have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it's no wonder that software managers and teams almost always develop poor estimates. But that doesn't mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are optimistic guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go. Linda Rising has been part of many development projects where sincere, honest people wanted to make the best estimates possible and used "scientific" approaches to make it happen-and all for naught.
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Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
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Building Great Teams What allows some teams to deliver results that far exceed expectations? How do these groups differ from most others? What can group members and leaders do to enable these extraordinary experiences? Geoff Bellman, along with his partner Kathleen Ryan, spent four years diving deeply into self-declared fantastic teams. They interviewed people from sixty great teams, added their own experience as managers and consultants, and came to ground-breaking conclusions documented in their book, Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results. Geoff presents their discoveries about what makes for exceptional performance. Sharing the eight indicators that his study shows are key, Geoff offers up the primary needs people fulfill by interacting in groups and suggests ways of meeting those needs within work teams.
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Geoff Bellman, GMB Associates, Ltd.
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Making Sense of Extroverts and Introverts Have you worked with someone whose communication style or behavior frustrates you? Extraverts and introverts exhibit significant differences in interaction preferences and work styles; they also differ in what, when, and how they communicate. Such differences can cause frayed nerves, misunderstandings, reduced productivity, and poor results. The good news is that extraverts and introverts who understand this dynamic can form powerful teams, benefit from each other's strengths, and laugh about their differences. Naomi Karten helps you broaden your awareness of introversion and extraversion and dispel your misconceptions about why “they” behave as they do. Learn exactly how these personality types perceive each other–the positives and the negatives–and gain insight into your own behavior and how it may affect others.
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Naomi Karten, Karten Associates
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Embracing Change: Transforming Ideas and Challenges into Opportunities Why are managers so poor at bringing about change? Why do people often resist and sometimes reject necessary changes? The reality is that people at all levels, from test managers to senior executives, often use flawed practices when trying to implement improvements and necessary changes. Many ignore, trivialize, or fail to act on the human element-the impact of the change on the people affected. Naomi Karten shares practices she has successfully employed to introduce changes and manage improvement efforts, often helping people turn the challenges of change into personal and company successes. In this serious yet lighthearted presentation, Naomi describes the stages many people go through when adjusting to challenging change-from the appearance of a change, to their sometimes-turbulent response, and their ultimate adjustment and acceptance.
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Naomi Karten, Karten Associates
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Sleeping with the Enemy Unfortunately, traditional software delivery models are often based on a lack of trust among stakeholders. Because the business doesn't trust developers, testers are asked to provide independent validation. Because developers don't trust testers, everyone wastes a lot of time arguing about whether a problem is in the code or in the tests. And testers-they are taught not to trust anyone! All of this distrust even though we share the same end-goal-delivering a product that satisfies our customers. Gojko Adzic describes why independent testing should be a vestige of the past. He explains how testers engaging with developers and business users gives testers opportunities to accomplish things they cannot do otherwise.
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Gojko Adzic, Neuri Ltd.
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How to Win Friends and Influence People - and Deliver Quality Software Since first published, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People has motivated generations of aspiring leaders to polish up their people skills. Yet imagine the reaction of a typical software quality assurance or test professional opening the book and reading the first principle: Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. "Don't criticize? Isn't that a tester's job!" They turn to the next chapter to find: Give honest and sincere appreciation. "Honest feedback, perhaps, but appreciation with the buggy code we get from the developers?" Concerned, they check out the third chapter: Arouse in the other person an eager want. "Now wait a minute. That sounds like something that would get me called into HR!" It's easy to discount and even parody the lessons from Dale Carnegie's work.
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Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence & Development, Inc.
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Scrum: The Basics Too many software projects spend too much time and money delivering too little, too late. Projects drag on for months, either thrashing from the chaos of ever-changing requirements or rigidly rejecting legitimate changes. If they deliver at all, they deliver products with too few features and too many bugs. Customers blame developers for not meeting their commitments. Developers blame customers for not knowing what they want. Dale Emery presents the better way-Scrum-a simple approach for managing complex projects. Scrum succeeds by breaking the development process into monthly or daily-or shorter-delivery cycles. Within every monthly cycle, a Scrum team plans, develops, and delivers new features with high quality and high business value. Every day, the team reports progress and coordinates its work. Scrum builds rapid action-oriented feedback into every step, guiding the team to stay on track.
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Dale Emery, DHE
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It's the People; It's Always the People Why do we insist on calling people “resources?” If software projects were a factory, people would be fungible-interchangeable equipment just like desks and computers. Because software development is highly creative work and not a manufacturing factory, we need to manage people as human beings, not as tasks or resources. Johanna Rothman describes how to find and develop the right people for your teams and projects-people who fit your culture, share your values, and will become integral parts of your team. She explores what skills make a team great and how great managers model those skills and reward people who use them to help the project. Find out how to empower your team, including protecting it from bad influences, making sure the team has what it needs, and helping team members learn to be accountable to each other. It's the people working in teams-and not their managers-who make software projects successful.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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You Can Always Get What You Want Agile, waterfall, iterative, staged, gated, phased-none of it really matters if all you create are a few early "wins", mediocre solutions, and quick fixes. Many organizations twist the time pressure screws so tightly that creative thinking can only be done after work or surreptitiously during the five-minute coffee break or the fifteen-minute lunch at your desk. We often are told that “good enough” software is what the company needs. Although “good enough” is acceptable when the systems we create neither differentiate us from our competitors nor are critical to our mission, why do we waste precious resources creating those kinds of systems? Tim Lister knows that there is hope because many organizations do create superior systems-systems that set them above their competitors and wow their customers. What are these organizations doing to yield innovative, superior results from their software development?
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Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
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Redirecting the Doomed Project It is nearly impossible to work in software development and not end up on a project which one day ends as a death march. These projects are characterized by being extremely overdue, significantly over budget, and, at the same time, critical to company success. Death marches can happen regardless of development methodology because the contributing factors often include dramatic scope change, lack of vision, and unrealistic deadlines-factors that are methodology neutral. Bob Hartman shares his experiences with death march projects and the approaches he has used to redirect them into successful efforts. He focuses on how stakeholders can identify and address underlying problems early in the project. Learn how to lead rather than manage, encourage creativity rather than stifle it, and become successful rather than beaten.
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Bob Hartman, Agile For All
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